Claim 02 of 06
Every disease, cured.
Progress is measured by the share of named human diseases with at least one approved disease-modifying therapy. That share has risen from 5.0 to 6.5 percent since 2020, against a completion threshold of 100 percent.
Primary measure
Basis of the progress score
The single objective measure assigned to this claim, tracked from the 2020 baseline to the current value. This measure alone determines the progress percentage.
Share of known diseases with an approved disease-modifying therapy
Of the roughly 10,000 diseases named in medical classification, the share for which at least one approved therapy modifies the course of the illness rather than only managing symptoms. Completion requires coverage of all of them. The threshold used for the date estimate is coverage of conditions representing 90 percent of global disease burden.
Supporting measures
Related indicators
Reported alongside the primary measure to show whether it is consistent with the wider evidence. These do not enter the progress score. Bars show relative movement only.
Recent developments
Events since 2025
Developments relevant to this claim, and their effect on the primary measure where there is one.
Completion estimate
Basis for 2059
Starting point, adjustments applied, and the resulting estimate.
No prediction market prices this claim, because it has no settleable definition. The date estimate uses a substitute threshold: the year in which approved disease-modifying therapies exist for conditions representing 90 percent of global disease burden.
The primary measure is increasing at approximately 0.25 percentage points per year. Linear extrapolation of that rate reaches 100 percent coverage in the twenty-fourth century.
Two supporting measures are increasing far faster. Approved gene and cell therapies rose from approximately 20 in 2020 to approximately 60 in 2026. AI-enabled assets in human trials rose from near zero to 117 across 63 companies. Both are compounding.
The date estimate assumes the disease count follows the technology curve rather than its own recent history, with an inflection in the mid-2030s conditional on AGI-class systems being applied to biology near the Metaculus median of November 2033. On that assumption, 90 percent burden coverage falls near 2059.
Uncertainty on this figure is larger than on any claim except suffering, because the estimate depends on an inflection that has not yet occurred.
Assessment
Arguments for and against
The strongest available case on each side, stated without weighting.
Reasons to expect completion
- Structural biology has been substantially solved computationally.Protein structure prediction moved from an unsolved fifty-year problem to routine infrastructure in under five years. Ligand binding accuracy roughly doubled again with IsoDDE in February 2026.
- The AI-designed pipeline has reached human trials at scale.117 assets across 63 companies are in interventional trials. Zasocitinib cleared two Phase 3 trials in December 2025 and is the leading candidate for a first approval in this class.
- Rare disease is the largest and most tractable segment.Of more than 7,000 recognised rare diseases, fewer than 5 percent have an approved treatment. A majority are monogenic, which is the case computational design handles best.
- Discovery cost and time are falling sharply.Reported timelines from target to development candidate have compressed from roughly ten years to approximately eighteen months at leading platforms.
- Validated mechanisms transfer between diseases.Each approved therapy establishes a mechanism applicable to related conditions, so the marginal cost of subsequent therapies within a class declines.
Reasons to expect failure
- Clinical trials are the binding constraint and are unaffected by computational improvement.Of 117 AI-enabled assets in trials, 60 have completed Phase 1 and 8 have completed Phase 2. Attrition rates and trial durations are unchanged from historical norms.
- Discovery was not the historical bottleneck.Failure has predominantly occurred in Phase 2 and Phase 3 on efficacy and safety grounds, which reflect human biological variation rather than insufficient candidate generation.
- Several categories in the count are not tractable as diseases.Aging, addiction, and most psychiatric conditions lack discrete molecular targets and are unlikely to yield to the same approach.
- Small-population diseases lack a funding mechanism.A therapy for a condition affecting a few hundred patients is not commercially viable under current reimbursement structures, and no alternative has been established at scale.
- The disease count is growing.Antimicrobial resistance is generating new resistant pathogens at a rate comparable to the rate at which approvals are issued against them.
- The definition of cured is unstable.As management improves, the threshold for counting a disease as cured is likely to shift, making the measure sensitive to classification decisions.
Scenarios
Most likely paths
Two sequences: the most probable route to completion and the most probable route to failure. These are structured projections, not forecasts, and neither is assigned a probability.
Most likely path to completion
The most probable path proceeds in three phases distinguished by biological complexity.
The first phase covers monogenic disease and is already underway. The first CRISPR therapy for sickle cell disease was approved in 2023. Remaining single-gene conditions are addressed sequentially through the 2030s as delivery vectors improve, since the causal biology is understood and the remaining problem is delivery rather than target identification. This phase covers approximately 5,000 conditions, most of them rare.
The second phase covers oncology. Therapies are designed against an individual tumour genome rather than against a tumour type. By the mid-2040s the limiting factor in metastatic disease is manufacturing turnaround rather than treatment availability.
The third phase covers multifactorial conditions: neurodegeneration, autoimmunity, metabolic disease. These require system-level models of human physiology capable of substituting for early-phase trials. That capability is assumed to arrive in the 2050s.
Coverage of 90 percent of global disease burden is reached near 2059. Coverage of the full 10,000-condition count remains incomplete beyond that point, concentrated in conditions with very small affected populations.
Most likely path to failure
The most probable failure is a widening gap between candidate generation and clinical validation.
Discovery capacity continues to increase. By the mid-2030s plausible therapeutic candidates can be generated for essentially any named disease within hours, and the number of untested candidates reaches the millions.
Trial capacity does not increase proportionally. Phase 3 cost and duration remain governed by patient recruitment, endpoint accrual, and regulatory review. The share of generated candidates that ever enter human testing falls steadily.
Access diverges by jurisdiction. Unvalidated therapies become available in permissive regulatory environments, generating uncontrolled outcome data that cannot support approvals elsewhere.
The conditions responsible for most mortality remain unresolved, because they are heterogeneous categories rather than single diseases. Coverage stabilises near 30 percent of the named-disease count, concentrated in conditions with well-defined molecular causes.
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